Nothing else matters
by vert-vert
Summary: They should have had a chance to say and do more than John Knowles let them, so - my version. Gene/Finny
1. Chapter 1

_disclaimer: Gene & Finny belong to the estate of John Knowles, not me._

* * *

**Nothing else matters**

* * *

_"He was nodding his head, his jaw tightening __and his eyes closed on the tears. 'I believe you. __It's okay because I understand and I believe you. __You've already shown me and I believe you.'"_

He meant what he'd said: it was okay - now that he knew what he knew.

From the window I looked out at the spot where I'd been the night before. Unsurprisingly there wasn't much to see; I turned back to him.

He'd wiped his face. With a bleak shadow of a smile he told me I could come back after five, if I wanted, "I should be conscious by then, just don't expect me to make much sense," he said.

His hands lay before him on the sheet; I touched the back of one with an index finger. He looked up, unreadable.

I would be back, and said so. Then I left him.

Outside, I forced the damp fresh air into my lungs and shut him out of my mind as best I could. Away from him the day passed rapidly, forgettably.

* * *

He was asleep when I returned to the infirmary. Sitting there as the room grew dark, I briefly dozed, then woke and stretched and stood and for lack of anything better to do, opened the door to the hall. Again, looking out only made me look back. The last inhibiting voice in me had gone quiet, and the reality of my feelings for Finny resolved and coalesced: he meant more to me than anybody. Hell, I loved him.

And once he'd loved me, for some unimaginable reason. That was clear too.

My hand was still on the door; I pushed it shut. He turned over and groaned slightly. He was awake. His eyes were open.

He reached for the lamp and switched it on. The light was flat and undramatic, the room impersonal, the patient pale.

"Dreamed I was dead. Dreamed I was dead and crying for myself, couldn't stop." He took a glass from the bedside table, gulped the water, and tipped the last drops onto his hands, and pressed them to his face. "Then _you_ were in the dream, and that made no sense at all, unless you were dead too. You said you belonged here, like you said this morning. Then I was awake . . . "

I wasn't sure what to say to this, and offered the already established, "You would have been fine without what I did. Nothing would have happened to you at all."

He half-raised himself on his elbows. "Don't need reminding - I know, you know, by now half the school probably knows . . ." He looked at me for the first time and said, "For a while I hated you so much I couldn't see straight. I'd never known you at all, and here I'd been thinking I knew you better than anybody; even said so."

He paused, lay back casually, looked up at the ceiling, and said "You know what's weird? I'm back to thinking I _do_ know you; just differently, more, worse, whatever. And it's okay. Like you said, you belong - here, and that's that, Forrester. Nothing else matters."

I felt it deep that he was wrong, and that he shouldn't have wanted me back; but I wasn't about to correct him. I loved him and you don't correct people you love if you only_ feel _they're wrong. Not when they want you back.

"Dr. Stanpole says worse breaks than this stay at school all the time, so I won't be going home, should be back at the dorm in a few days."

Then dinner arrived, for one; on a tray.

I wanted to tell him what he meant to me. But having this plate of food between us put me off the idea. I looked at my watch, "Maybe I should go."

He asked, with his mouth full, "You had any dinner?"

"I'm not really hungry."

"Then stay."

I wanted to stay, but staying meant talking and talking would lead to telling, and I'd changed my mind about that.

"I almost forgot; I brought the Latin you were working on."

He looked at the folder unenthusiastically. "Stay." He said.

I stayed. For a dead general, Caesar proved agreeable enough, demanding little more than the memory of learned lessons. For an hour we focused on the text, full of death and struggle in a remote, long ago war.

* * *

That night it was my turn to dream. Dr. Stanpole appeared out of nowhere in particular, saying "Your friend is dead." This wasn't as disturbing as it sounds, because Finny was there and started arguing with him. Then the doctor was gone and Finny was edging away, out on the branch among the leaves. Letting go of the tree's trunk, I took a step, and fell, hitting the floor hard. I lay there for a while with the sheet still twisted around me. It was plain: the worst was behind me – no, not me - us.

* * *

Having been driven the few blocks distance from the infirmary, we were on the short brick walk leading the dorm. Overhead, a clouded sky grudgingly revealed here and there, a few tentative signs of blue. A brief and unexpected spot of sun passed over us.

"You trusted me." I told him.

Ahead of me, he stopped.

"So?"

"It was just a thing you did and I took it for granted."

He crutched up the few steps to the entrance, "Get the door for me, will ya?"

"No, stop – here's better."

Looking over his shoulder, "For what?" he asked, his hair pale in the shifting light.

"Humor me." Outside _was_ better. I knew it instinctively. "Please."

He relented, and parking his crutches against the low wall flanking the steps, sat down there, then loosened the scarf around his neck, and looked up at me.

"Well?"

"Remember that best pal stuff you said at the beach?"

He thought for a moment; then nodded.

"I wasn't brave enough to trust you back. Nowhere near, and it only got worse. I flunked that trig test the next day and began to think it was no accident. You were wrecking my grades intentionally. Stunts like the trip to the beach, getting me out to the tree every night had a purpose. You hated me, and you wanted to help me fail in every way you could. I stopped believing in any kind of best pal talk from you."

I sat down a few feet from him. "It went on until that last afternoon when I told you I needed to study and you tried to make me stay. For once I could see your mind working, and knew the truth. You'd been thinking I was like you - I'm nothing like you, don't have what it takes - never will. It was a shock knowing that, knowing how wrong I'd been.

"In a few minutes we were in the tree - and then _you_ weren't. I jumped alone, there was no fear at all for a change - I felt nothing. In a detached kind of way I wondered if I'd killed you. You were sprawled there on the dirt, your leg twisted and broken and your blood everywhere, but you were breathing. It was the part of me that hated you that died. I understood that later.

"No thinking part of me had wanted to hurt you, but I did it, just the same. I did it."

The sun was gone, and the breeze stirred his hair, now dark again. He turned to me, and said: "You wanted to tell me, I wouldn't let you. You had to tell me, I had to know . . . It's over."

"How can it be over?"

"Just is."

How could he sit there and say that? Without much conviction I told him "You're crazy."

"'Look at it this way," he said, pulling his scarf off altogether, "If you'd been less of a person, would you ever have tried to tell me back in Boston? And when you did, could I listen? _No, I couldn't. _Maybe that seems crazy and it only made things worse, but something in me just shut down. You had to be wrong. There was no way in hell I could face what you'd said.

"Now Leper opens up, and makes it a 'fact.' So I have no friend, just the fact; and I wanted to get away, and I tried to go. Next thing, I was at the bottom of the stairs with another fact: running was useless; there _was_ nowhere to go.

"Then you were outside the window and I _so_ wanted to beat the shit out of you. And I tried - couldn't do that either. I hated your being there, hated hearing your voice - whatever you had to say. Couldn't understand why you were there. I gave up on trying to do anything, and lay there flat on the floor, listening to you, your _sorrys_.

"Don't know how long I was on the floor, but pulling myself back onto the bed; that's when it hit me: there was something in you I couldn't hate. There was something in your _sorrys _stronger than any of Brinker's 'facts.'"

He bent his head back, watching a passing hawk, his wide eyes soberly reflecting the gray sky.

"I was right - wasn't I?"

This last was as much a statement as a question, almost inaudible.

In a voice as low as his, I answered "I belonged there, Finny."

He stood, maneuvered his crutches, leaned forward towards me and let me know it was time we were back inside. He was matter-of-fact. The air was cooler, and the sky had turned a much darker gray. I followed him in.

* * *

The doctor had reduced Finny's class attendance for a few weeks to rest the leg and I was asked to help him out with the classes he was missing. Sitting at his desk, our heads close together with his hair sometimes in my face as he reached for something, I was where we agreed I belonged and, as he said, nothing else mattered. We were both, I thought, rudderless and drifting, and I, at least was happy not to think about where we were headed or why.

An unexpected answer to this unasked question came soon enough, his sense of destination always being stronger than mine.

It was a Monday, after dinner, in our room, when he rose from his desk and came over to the lion carved chair where I was sorting notes on the floor in front of me. His shadow fell quickly across the yellow papers and I felt a kiss on the top my head, his left hand by my ear.

The chair's castors creaked as I slowly twisted and asked "What was that for?"

Leaning against his cane, looking everywhere but at me, he answered "If French Generals can kiss each other right left and center . . . Well, you looked deserving and I felt like it."

That he'd kissed me didn't matter much; Finny was always doing things only he could get away with, things that meant God knows what or nothing at all. But coupled with the words, the gesture was something else. My eyes wandered back to the sorted notes as I took it in. _Looked deserving. _He'd forgiven me. Rationally, I'd known this fact for days, but only now it settled in – and now my flooded head swam with it.

* * *

Finny's French was fairly good and he had an ear for the accent but often something in the textbook irked him. He had been indulging in a typical rant about the word _inusable_; that it meant everlasting apparently appealed to his sense of the absurd.

I said, when he wound down, "There's something I have to tell you."

"Again?" He didn't look up from his work.

I glanced over at his handwritten French, somehow always neater than his English, "Something you maybe already know."

He stopped writing.

His pen to his lip, "Maybe you don't need to tell me then."

My resolve faded. Maybe he was right; maybe there _was _no need to say anything. "Damn pen's out of ink." I said.

He passed his pen over to me.

As I drew a long row of loops on my blotter with his blue ink, I half-heartedly improvised. "I love your little rants, didn't know how much I missed them till now; haven't heard one in so long."

He made no reply, and seemed ready to let it go. The moment over, I pitched his pen back to him.

He leaned back and caught the pen. His eyes, until then hidden in the shadows cast by the desk lamp, were on me, "Come on, there's something you want to say; say it and get it over with."

It was suddenly easy, I did as he said.

"It's that I love _you_ - period, full stop. Never meant for it to happen, but there it is: I love you."

He was looking down again now, watching his pen rolling back and forth between his fingers. "Oh."

His eyes shifted back to mine, "So something ignorant and blind managed to break my leg, and now the rest of you loves me - without meaning to."

I opened my mouth. But he spoke first.

"Sorry, I'm not being fair - it's just... People think it's dead wrong. Why even come out with it?"

I explained, "_It_ – never even thought about _it - _then I had a glimpse of what you are to me, and thought _it_ was wrong; _people do. _Eventually, I thought different; there's nothing wrong in it, nothing at all, it's okay."

"That's a lot of its." he observed, then he stepped over, put his hands on my head, brushed my face with his and again kissed me, on the mouth this time, his lips parted.

He drew back, "Okay, my turn to own up. Yeah, suppose I love you back; just been too conventional to make a fuss and say so."

"You've kind of already told me."

"When?"

"The time you kissed the top of my head."

"Oh, yeah, forgot about that. Don't know what came over me."

"And when you came back, in November; I never forgot that look you gave me when you thought I was enlisting. You wanted me around, and I didn't know why."

"I didn't either, back then." He let me go and asked seriously, "You absolutely sure about_ this_?" He ran his hand up my arm. "No going back."

"I'm okay with it, Fin,_ inusablement,_ probably."

"_Inusablement_ is a long time. What about what I want?" Feigning mild outrage he messed my hair with his hands, then eased away, saying "Tell me; show me why I should put up with it. I need persuading."

Moving forward, close, leaning into him, lowering my head to his neck, I found his pulse beating gently into my cheek. I kissed him there. Going further, with my face I pushed back his open collar exposing his shoulder and I kissed him there too.

I hadn't noticed that I was crying, don't think I was, really, but there must have been a few tears, because he found them, and smeared them with his nose and lips, and kissed them onto my mouth. We settled on his bed. Our limbs were too many for the narrow mattress, making us a crowded tangle with roaming hands and mouths, and his cast scraped against my leg, but we made do.

"Devon put us together, seems like they knew what they were doing." It came from me as a joke, but Phineas, oddly didn't take it that way, "Devon? Don't be a sap; it wasn't Devon. I did it. You did it. What we've been to one another did it." His words were hard to improve upon, and for a long while nothing more was said, or needed saying. When, at length, I improvised some unlikely rules discouraging the illicit use of dormitory beds, he laughed, stifling the sound against my chest.

Soon, he was on his side behind me, asleep, barely snoring, his arm at my waist. Unused to so much of him so close, I lay there knowing I needed more space to sleep.

When I moved away, he woke. I asked if he minded that I wanted to be back in my own bed.

His ability to find physical comfort almost anywhere made my lacking it always a surprise to him. "You sure it's not just us, together? You have your way with me and ten minutes later, you're having second thoughts - aren't you?" He pushed me back, looked me over and added "Nah, maybe not." He was only playing, but with his face inches from mine, I couldn't help wondering if a trace of fear remained; the fear that even now I might desert him.

"I only need some sleep, and I'll be all of seven feet away, and I'm done with having second thoughts."

His fingers around my arm above the elbow, he asked, "What about tomorrow?"

"What about it?"

"What about _us_ tomorrow?"

I looked down at his fingers, my arm, then at him in the eye. "I suppose unless I get a better offer, I'll be right here."

"That's the spirit: no cheating on me unless it's with somebody really worthwhile."

"Love you." I said, and he let me go.

* * *

My cold bed grew warmer. No longer refusing an embrace I hadn't wanted to want, I relaxed, and fell asleep, his scent still on me.

Hours later he roused me, his index finger tracing its way to the end of my nose. He sat down on the bed, his hand lightly grasping my foot through the covers, looking at me wordlessly, with the morning sun full on him. I lay there fresh from sleep, pleasantly inert, understanding and understood. There in the light it seemed that nothing was ever likely to interfere, that nothing else would ever grieve us. I was surely wrong, but I didn't care. In that golden moment nothing else mattered, not one tiny bit.

* * *

_"Finny must die precisely because he refuses to reject the possibility of loving Gene." Eric Tribunella - Refusing the Queer Potential: John Knowles's A Separate Peace_


	2. Chapter 2

_**A/N: March 2013 - Someday I will re-write & probably re-format Chapters 2, 3 & 4 as a longer bunch of linked scenes - with quite different material - someday.**_

* * *

As you may have guessed, I'd never been touched before.

And now I had been.

* * *

He'd gone. It was late morning.

Involuntarily I shook - a shudder went through me. And another. I lay down on his bed and waited for it to pass.

That's what you get, I supposed; wandering into unknown territory, and back, you come back changed. Physically, even.

I wondered if that's all it was. Maybe I'd caught something from him. It had happened before, there was a history of his catching something disagreeable and passing it on to me. No contact necessary.

Now after all kinds of contact, I checked my face in the mirror for signs of illness. I observed carefully the face he'd kissed, the body he'd been all over. Half-expecting an unhealthy flush; the pox; depravity's reward.

I _was_ flushed, and grimly laughed at myself, imagining describing our encounter to nurse Windbag or some other denizen of the infirmary.

I figured I was quite healthy; diagnosis: a slight case of neurasthenia. Morbid excitement; this was nothing new for me, only its cause being novel.

Nothing outward had changed, except for our indecorously messed up sheets, the absence of maids for the duration, suddenly a blessing.

I changed the sheets, opened the window, propped my feet up on the sill, and looked up at the blue sky through the trees half in leaf.

History lay there unstudied in my lap, him, us, stuck in my head. Unable to concentrate, I gave up on study. I turned my hand to sorting out his things from mine. A pointless exercise, as he was sure to jumble them back again, but it passed the time mindlessly enough. I was considering the pattern his teeth had left on a pencil when he opened the door.

Coming in, he held a few flowers. Nobody picked flowers at Devon. It was a boys' school, it didn't happen. Leper might have, once, but those would have been wild; and these were plainly from some tended plot. I doubted Finny even knew their name.

"Narcissus" he said, proving me wrong. "Don't worry, unsentimental little flowers. An old lady on Front street forced them on me, said she'd picked too many." He held them up, gave me a provoking look, probably hoping for some sign of disbelief. He didn't get one.

"Probably overcome by your beauty, I muttered."

He smiled to himself.

"Yours, I think." I offered him the pencil. He held it between his front teeth while he rummaged for coke bottles to hold the flowers.

With the water in the greenish bottles shimmering, the flowers giving their peculiar scent, he looked down at me sitting there, and said "We've done something terrible, Forrester - and I'm going to have to keep you quiet. Cut your tongue out, maybe."

Focusing somewhere else "You're the one who talks too much, besides, I like my tongue."

The pencil abandoned, he sat on the corner of his bed reached over and pulled my hand to his mouth, "Even if I do talk too much, I never bore you, do I?"

"Stop slobbering on my hand."

"You always eat the one you love. And you haven't answered the question."

In no mood to lie, I told him "Sometimes, just a little; nobody's perfect."

It was only barely ever true, but he could handle it. Might end up enjoying it, our wrestling had never been wholly physical.

Bad as ever in masking any disappointment, he gave my hand back and said "What say we go out?"

"Where to?"

"The river, the tree."

This was unexpected. I looked across at him. "For what?"

"It's green again out there. You've been stuck in here all day. I want to, so shut up and let's go."

I didn't want to see the tree. Another shudder. I had no comeback.

We set out like it was the most normal thing in the world, and not a trek to a spot I thought he never wanted to see again. I was quiet while he began to speak inconsequentially. His voice I heard, but I was paying little attention to the words, being more conscious of the rhythm of his cane flashing ahead in the corner of my eye. We crossed the campus. "You didn't want to come, but it was for your own good."

"How?"

"The broody part of you is acting up. I knew it when I came into our room just then. You fret over stuff like a dog with a bone." He sometimes had the gift for saying important things simply.

* * *

The tree stood there dumbly as trees do. My memories of the place seemed suddenly dusty and remote, irrelevant.

He sat down against a tree, not_ the_ tree, complained mildly of the damp, looked slightly up at me and said, "I used to think I knew you better than you knew yourself. I was wrong. And you thought, well you were wrong too. We have to go from there, from here.. a clean slate."

I had to think before I answered him. "The slate's as clean as it's going to be. I'm okay, just need time to adjust. A boy doesn't get seduced every night, you know. This morning I woke up feeling free, then you stepped out and, well, I was alone, wasn't I? I'm a moody bastard - don't worry about it. I'm okay"

His hand wandered to my waist, his thumb through a belt loop "Don't keep me out, that's all. I've always been able to feel it when you do. When I came in the room just then - see I don't mind boring you, always knew I did, _just a little, _as long as you don't turn away, all moody."

"Sorry."

"Don't be."

We'd been quiet for a while when I spoke, "You never had a clue how much the limb, the tree, jumping scared me - stomach churning scared me. You weren't afraid, you never had a clue, you didn't know, I didn't ... We were miles apart." I paused for a long moment. "You were right enough. It's better that I came."

"Am I still clueless?"

"You know me now; really know me, like nobody else. That's better than any clue."

After a while, looking away, "Does anything scare you?" I asked him.

He sighed, "After graduation, I figure out want I want to do - that scares me. It's in my face, and I'll have no war to go get away to. My family expects more from me than I can manage. You can make me work, but without you around I'm a lost cause education-wise." Not a word about the leg. "What scares you, Gene?"

"How you'll do when the cast comes off. Never seeing you after commencement. The war, dying suddenly out there, or dying slowly. There are lots of ways to die, and I'm not fond of any of them." I broke off; then added "Never forgiving myself."

"Gene, you think you're so deep, you're a little kinked I admit, but at bottom you're almost as simple as you think I am. You think your only problem is never forgiving yourself. You will, it'll come, wait and see, you'll find your balance someday when you're not even looking for it.

There in the fading warmth of the sun, moments I'd brushed off, found easy to ignore and hadn't bothered to remember came flooding back along with the ghost of the words _I was not of the same quality as he. _They were still true but all the bite in them was gone.

"I love you, Finny."

"Heard that one before."

"All right, I don't love you." I dug in my pocket and passed him a folded paper with my writing on it. "Here, read this, it's about you, sort of."

"Shakespeare" he groaned, holding it the page at arm's length.

_So are you to my thoughts as food to life,  
Or as sweet-season'd showers are to the ground;  
And for the peace of you ..._

Here he stopped "So this _you_ is me?"

"Yup."

He continued.

_...I hold such strife  
As 'twixt a miser and his wealth is found;  
Now proud as an enjoyer and anon  
Doubting the filching age will steal his treasure,_

_Now counting best to be with you alone,  
Then better'd that the world may see my pleasure;_

"Just as well they don't" he added.

_All full with feasting on your sight  
And by and by clean starvéd for a look;  
Possessing or pursuing no delight,  
Save what is had or must from you be took.  
Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day,  
Or gluttoning on all, or all away._

"You have me read the strangest things. I'm not as romantic as you."

"It could use a little translating." I said.

"I can see what it means - mostly. Just promise me you don't start writing me poems."

"I won't promise you that, you need some poems."

"I just don't need any poems _about_ me, all right?"

"No promises."

It was too late, I'd already written him poems. But I didn't need to read them to him, or have them read aloud. I knew better than that. I kept them to myself. Later, I shared them occasionally with people who knew nothing of Finny, save through them, through the words he'd given me, the words that I'd made of him.

Catching him looking at me, it came across in his eyes: everything had changed for him but me. This tone deaf boy with perfect pitch in head and heart would always best and outweigh me; that remained. It worked for him, it worked for me. We both knew it.

Tackling me, he slid his hand and arm up the back of my shirt, I twisted and pulled him across me. He touched the side of my face with one of his hands and as once before kissed me firmly on the top of my head, saying my name under his breath. I shuddered. Not for the first time I felt my loyalties and his momentarily transfused, his fears and mine coursing between us back and forth, before relaxing into unity.

He was lying next to me. Looking up there were only branches and the sky, now past every bit of twilight color. When we sat up I realized that one of my shoes was off. We felt around for it in the dark. Finding it, he replaced it on my foot and solemnly knotted the laces. All I could see in the dark were my white shoe, his cast, his moving hands.

_**A/N: This should be the end of chapter two - When a little more developed I'll formally re-divvy it up . **_

* * *

"She told me I was _'Playing_ at being a lazy feckless idiot.' It didn't bother me much when she said it. She's my mother; she says things like that. It only hit me after."

It was bedtime and the lights were out but this wasn't one of his monologues.

"You're no kind of idiot, Phineas."

After a pause, a response: "What about "feckless and lazy?'"

He was seriously looking at himself through another's eyes. This was new to him. And truth be told, his mother had a point.

"Think about it: you only study in fits and starts. What do you expect?"

There was no reply. I was used to his dozing off before me, but as far as I could remember, that night I slept first.

* * *

Being a busy spring, that Senior wartime spring, nobody had time or interest enough to care whether the two of us were happy, or sad, present or absent. Or so I hoped.

I settled into a suspicion that no one was paying attention. Then one day a lower middler I'd never liked the look of asked me if what he'd heard about Finny and me was true. He phrased it in just that way. The insidious ambiguity of what he meant and which might be worse - love or treachery - almost made me laugh. I looked through him and answered "Probably." And that was it, we were left alone.

* * *

Brinker didn't have the whole picture, it had never been his business anyhow. Without him maybe things would have stayed stuck the same. I'd once told him that the truth would out. I hadn't wanted to be right; I thought there was a way around it. I was wrong. The truth of what I'd done to Finny, of what Finny and I were to one another _had_ to out.

Brinker had almost ceased to exist for Phineas. He spoke to him now only to complain about the noise Brinker made in his room. Finny had hardened towards him to the point where he could know longer see him as the part-time pompous ass he'd known before. Someone who it seemed to me, while understanding nothing, had managed to both hurt and help us. Unresisting, I followed Finny's example and cold-shouldered Brinker too.

Had Finny used his last dram of forgiveness on me? It seemed possible. For a moment the notion pleased me; then turned bitter. It wasn't right taking pleasure, not from that.

Going down those same First building stairs I passed Brinker going up. He turned and followed me. "Gene, slow down." It went through my mind to run, and I considered that Brinker would take it as a challenge and follow, so I stopped, unready for any words from him, observing the fresh pink marble floor where a muddy mat had lain through the winter. He would want something from me; he usually wanted something, and rarely gave much in return. Transactions with Brinker tended to benefit Brinker, and I had difficulty seeing this plea as likely to be anything much different from what had gone before.

"If Finny can forgive you, you can forgive _me_ - at least give it a try" he said with an earnest and serious glance.

Coming from Brinker this was strangely transparent. Something had shifted.

"You're not me. I'm not Finny." The words came to me only after he was gone. He hadn't waited for my reply. He was already halfway up the stairs.

I was leaving our room as Brinker was leaving his. He caught my eye "Gene."

I was already in a pissy mood and he was an intrusion; an unpleasant reminder of something I wanted over but couldn't shake, maybe never would. "Brinker, not now, please, can't you just stay out of my way. Later maybe?"

"_Leper was right" _he said.

"When? What are you talking about?"

"The night Finny fell down the stairs. Leper called me a bastard. Leper was right."

Finny came out at that point. Every word would have been audible in our room.

Brinker looked past me to Finny saying "Gene turns his back everytime he sees me."

Finny replied " Maybe you hadn't noticed, lately, I haven't been much for speaking to you either. You may as well know, pretty much everybody else already thought the same as Leper. It's a fact, ask around."

I looked from Brinker to Finny "Wait a second..."

"Come on - Gene - class." He started down the stairs and I followed him leaving Brinker where he stood.

Outside he continued, "He never cared about me, He didn't care about you. It was all about Brinker. Did you notice the way he said 'The night Finny fell down the stairs,' like I did it to myself. The night he dragged us out, more like. And for what? To make himself look important, if we got hurt, so what? If I fell down the stairs, so what? It was his doing I was there. That whole business was his doing - period."

"I hurt you too. You forgave me."

"You didn't know what you were doing or why. He did. There's a difference. He hurt us both and meant to, now he cares, and it's too late."

"Maybe he didn't mean for things to happen the way they did. You understand me better because of him, I even think you understand yourself better, just a little, because of him."

He stared at me in disbelief "And we understand the Japanese better because of Pearl Harbor. Don't tell me about what I understand about myself. Maybe he should try and understand himself first."

"It look like he's tried. Brinker deserves a hearing out."

"Seems to me there's already been a hearing, if you want more from him go for it. Just leave me out."

Here we separated, having different classes.

* * *

Finny had told me he would be at the gym. Pushing one of the side entrance doors open I passed Brinker on the way out. I was close enough to touch him, but he didn't see me. That was odd as he noticed things, things other people missed.

I found Finny using a rowing machine. He'd once told me he found the very idea of pushing an oar back and forth boring as hell, but now I suspected that had been overcome by the simple urge in him to tackle every activity his cast permitted. I stood there looking down at him until he looked up at me with a kind of glum seriousness I never saw in him before the stairs, and he stopped rowing.

He spoke first. "Brinker was just here, cornered me, made me hear him."

"What'd he say?"

"Sorry."

"There must have been more than that."

"There was."

He was rowing again. There was no getting more out of him. Not yet.

* * *

His monologue that night picked up where we left off at the rowing machines.

"He didn't think it was healthy; you and me, didn't say the words exactly, but I know what he meant. I don't want to say jealous, but that was there too, seeing the two of us every day, it did something. I'd taken you away from everybody else. Taken us both away; without his permission I guess. He turned it into a kind of personal slap in the face."

He was sitting up in bed. I watched him speak. "He didn't stop to think why until he saw us, after what he did. Said he was sorry then."

"He didn't really suspect you of hurting me, thought of it as a joke. Didn't know how close to the truth he was. When Leper showed up and started blabbing, he says he just got carried away. He started to tear up then: _Brinker crying. _Something I never thought I'd live to see. I think he wanted to hug me or something, thank God, I was sitting down so that didn't happen. Anyway he bit his lip, left the room and I heard him run up the stairs and out the door."

"Got to feel sorry for him I suppose." I said.

"No, I don't, even a little; but having to bear a grudge is pointless. If he needs me to be okay with him, I'll be okay with him. It's over and I don't want to think about it anymore."

* * *

"So Finny's okay with me?"

Brinker's words echoing Finny's made me wonder if he'd been eavesdropping. "He's spoken to you, I'm guessing."

"He looked at me like I'd crawled out from under a rock, but, yes, he spoke to me, sounded normal enough."

"Well then, I guess you've already been informed: yes, he's talking to you, officially."

"This is absolutely none of my business, but I'll ask it anyway: why did he forgive you? Once or was it twice?"

He'd come into our room shortly after Finny'd gone out. We were alone. His tone was frank, but inoffensive. He was simply curious.

As he was blunt, I was blunt back at him "I almost killed him, then you almost killed him. He's forgiven both of us. Isn't knowing that enough for you?"

"Why did he come back to you?"

"Brinker, he once told me I was his best pal and I blew him off, or as good as. And then the tree. I don't know why he forgives anything, and I don't need to know. Being forgiven when you don't believe it will ever come, is enough."

In telling Brinker that, aloud, well, it was like telling the whole world that Phineas loved me, and I him. My load lightened. Telling Finny as I'd already done, more than once, hadn't helped, after all he already knew. I didn' t then know why it felt different, I wasn't there yet; that came later.

Brinker had nothing further to say about Finny and me. After making some small talk, he excused himself and slipped out the door.


	3. Chapter 3

November 1945, honorably discharged, I bought a ticket East.

I owed him nothing, or so I'd been telling myself that for two years plus. He wanted me to think that way. It never quite worked; there _was_ a debt.

As if to reinforce that notion of owing; in front of a church I passed that morning, on the way to the station, the sermon's theme had been posted: _I have swept away your offenses like a cloud, your sins like the morning mist. Return to me, for I have redeemed you. Isaiah 44:22._

He would have called my frame of mind morbid, and probably been right. It was from missing him too much, for too long, and as to a disease, my resistance was low. _Clean starvéd_ _for a look_ was a bad way to be.

So it was natural, that as soon as I was free, I did what I wanted to do most. I wnet back to him.

* * *

I'd arrived. He was there, waiting.

"Could have sworn there was an umbrella in the car." He said. I was cold. He was sopping wet. His blue overcoat collar turned up, no hat. Other than the effects of the weather, he was pretty much the same to look at. His hair too short to be plastered down over his eyes, their expression honest their color surprising, the creases in his brow, all as I remembered them.

I may as well say it here: I always loved Finny's hair a little grown out, and grudged barbers their periodic attentions. As soon as it was just as it should be, he would reappear shorn, his nape all military and stubbly. Today it was too short, and this was the first thing I told him.

And the first thing I wanted to do was to touch it to make sure he still existed for me as before. Sure enough, as he hugged me wetly there on the platform, the palm of my hand on the back of his head found familiar territory. My fingers paused there, the short hairs there softer than expected. No one looked. A lot of hugging was seen in America in 1945. Reassured by his solid stance and lack of limp, my eyes moved up his form, and only wished his hair had been longer, just a little.

"You stink of smoke." he said.

The contact with him had gotten rainwater all over me, and if anything, I was colder than before.

They'd been two long chaste years for me. Not so for him. His letters notes and cards as they began to come were charming, goofy, unfiltered, occasionally managing a discretion presumably in deference to the military censor. In communications signed Benito Juarez or Leopold of the Belgians or simply Ph, he'd kept me up to date of what he'd done, with whom and how often.

More to the point: _whom_ he'd done, and meant just that way. For him it apparently meant no more than killing ants, and I was meant to be okay with it. It left me wondering what was I to him after all? Just the first, or not even that? Which of him had I come back to?

* * *

Whomever it was, I was alone with him now.

His wet coat and shirt were hung to dry. His room, his family's house. The shirt was one of mine. I'd wondered where it had gone. I asked him about his reported conquests.

"Boredom makes you do things you wouldn't do otherwise. I exaggerated, some. I was just giving you an out, I suppose. I thought you might want one."

"_You thought _. . . " Staring resignedly at the gentle landscape of his neck, its subtle transition to his chest, I reached over and touched him. His short hair was just barely dry.

He said, his arm around my shoulder: "Thinking never was my strong suit."

"That's a f***ing understatement."

In the kind of gesture I'd forgotten to expect, this stealer of shirts, this redeemer (or not), stuck his tongue into my ear, and mumbled "I won't argue with that."

Whatever he was to me, wet-eared, and at ease with the uncertainty, for the first time in weeks, reflexively; I laughed. We flopped on the bed.

* * *

A painting hung at one end of the room. A portrait of his grandmother, when young, dressed in gray and yellow, with a background of black and white, in her hand a green bound book . The picture's colors had evidently set the scheme for the room.

On the table by me were photos framed in silver. One of them of Finny at about six, with his mother and the same, if older than the portrait, grandmother, and many pigeons, it was apparently in Venice, from Finny's age, in the early thirties. The women's long slender patterned dresses fluttered with the birds.

The picture reminded me that Finny was not particularly photogenic. To be precise, he's hard to photograph well. Oh, he's good looking enough but the camera rarely has his attention long enough, resulting in a slightly vacant gaze. Photographically, he's elusive.

I knew this because, back at Devon, during that last fateful winter there, with some Christmas money, I'd bought a camera from an upper middler who wanted to be rid of it because of the undesirable _Germany_ stamped on its bottom.

After our relationship had changed it seemed okay, even right and proper to want pictures of him. But it was harder than I expected, and the camera being good, made bad pictures seem worse. The best I managed were close-ups of the smooth width of the bridge of his nose, the freckles there, and his eyes, their depth captured for once, albeit in shades of gray, and his profiles, right and left.

Sometimes _he_ would shoot. His images tended to evoke all sorts of mystery that wasn't there, mainly because he didn't know how to handle light and dark and didn't really care to learn. I wanted to teach him, but not knowing much myself, never got very far. It was nice having pictures of me by him, whatever their quality.

His mother had come across the pictures. They were not a secret exactly, but, still, I hadn't planned for other eyes to know them. Being as sharp as Finny was vague, they told more than I'd wanted her to know.

She sat down in the chair next to mine. Her voice was somewhere between Katharine Hepburn and Eleanor Roosevelt, the product of a sort of female equivalent of Devon, where women of a certain class were made to sound like that, once upon a time.

"Doesn't forgive so easily, not any more." She said. I hadn't been paying attention and didn't know where this had come from.

I'd been half lost looking at the photo, it three figures, each standing with a hand outstretched, feeding birds on their hands. The women's birds were indistinct blurs. The one on Finny's was still and in focus, and his gaze fixed on it.

"He forgave me once. It meant a lot."

"Really? These days, once you cross the line with him, if it's bad enough, you're on your own. Seen him do it a number of times."

I thought of Brinker then, sure that Finny had said nothing. Her eyes, the same color as the light through the whiskey in her glass, took me in.

"It was bad enough. He fell because of me – from the tree."

She took it in. "It was a accident. Nobody meant it to happen."

"No, that's not right - I meant it." Briefly she looked as if she was ready to expel me from the garden, then though better of it.

"What did _he_ do to_ you_?"

"Made me know things about myself I didn't want to know. It was something wild in me. I didn't think, it just happened."

She finished her whiskey, what looked like five sips in one gulp.

"He knows this?"

"And forgave me."

She looked at me. "So who else are you a danger to?"

* * *

The evening before, she had walked in on us. We weren't actually doing anything, anything at all. I was lying across his bed and he was sitting on its edge. Nonetheless she'd caught the essence of the moment and didn't need things spelled out.

"Cigarette?" She was lighting up.

"No, thanks. He doesn't like to smell them on me." Saying this was a mistake, I knew it the second it was out. She looked at me over her glasses at the end of her nose, Finny's nose. Her eyes and mine, the same color.

"He wants me to quit too. Seems to have developed a sensitive nose." She'd let it pass. I reddened just the same.

"This all sounds nowhere near to being any of my business." she said, "But as long as he's happy and it's not doing him any harm. You might actually end up doing do him some good, though I can warn you, it won't be easy."


	4. Chapter 4

High around his neck, the pure, sharp green of my wool scarf contrasted agreeably with his face. A foil to the drab shadowless woods where we walked. It was a Sunday, near Boston, thirteen days into 1946.

Uncharacteristically he was silent, giving no sign of anything much. I wondered if what was to me a depressing combination of gray wildness and cold would stir him as such things had done at Devon. Left to my own devices I would probably end up projecting my mood onto him. I'd done it before, after all.

He unwrapped a candy bar and offered me some. After I shook my head no, balling up the paper, he swung back his arm to cast it out of sight into the trees, then changed his mind, reached over and slipped it into my pocket next to my gloved hand. We shared a glance without a smile. We were alone and save for us, the park seemed empty.

He broke the quiet, pushing back my muffler, revealing my shirt's yellow collar, "It isn't your color; not at all."

"Is that why you relieved me of it for two years? Editing my wardobe?"

"I took it because, I wanted, well, a keepsake. Besides, it looks better on me; even wore it for your coming back, and I've been waiting all this time for you to at least ask about it." He finished with ironic disappointment: "But no, until now, no reaction at all. So like you, Forrester."

Phineas' unpredictable sentimental vein was fully exposed, and a little mystery was solved. Something came back to me; admittedly something I hadn't wasted much mental energy on. The day I'd left Boston two years before, my packing done, my back turned, he'd stuffed a shirt of his in with my things and evidently extracted the yellow one. That shirt of his was probably still in my room back at home, folded neatly in a back of a drawer. My mother hadn't known what to make of it. "So pink" she'd said, shaking her head.

I'd forgotten all about it.

"I came back to a thief, then?"

"Stole your heart, didn't I?"

Mentally I rolled my eyes. "Could you be any cornier?"

More silence. A very few half-hearted snowflakes fell, then stopped.

I asked "Seriously; you said once, that night, back at Devon, that you'd loved me for a long time already. When did you know, first?"

He answered easily, without any sort of pause to consider.

"The first time you jumped from the tree. I was treading water looking up; when you hit the surface, and splashed my face, I took a breath, then opened my eyes. You bobbed up right next to me. Sounds silly, but it was then."

"Because I jumped. What if I hadn't?"

"Well then, I guess it would never have occurred to me. What do you think?" He said, in a voice too mild for sarcasm.

"Guess when I knew, first, when I felt it for you." Asking him, I had no clear moment in my head, more a series of shifts towards knowing him, myself.

"When I knew you . . . Not sure. Does it matter?"

"Just asking." That was a lie - I truly wanted to know, wanted the blanks filled in.

In his best, vaguely oracular mode, he read my thoughts. "No, you're not, you really want to know."

Avoiding his eyes, I looked up at nothing in particular. "Yeah."

"You were so very boys' school; butter wouldn't have melted in your mouth. I never thought you might end up thinking like this. Don't know if I even wanted you to. After I fell, and came back, in November or December, I realized that, whether you knew it or not, that you _did_. Then after I fell on the stairs I caught you telling me with more looks than I can remember. You thought I was thick that way and wouldn't see."

"I didn't think that."

"I thought you did."

"I went from hating you to hating myself - still haven't forgiven myself - loving you came out of that somehow. In some weird way back then I felt I was part of you." I still felt that way, but wasn't comfortable telling him so. My words once spoken seemed slightly ridiculous.

The sun broke through somewhat, giving us our shadows back. His face clouded over. "Not to encourage this crap, but which part of me were you, exactly?" There was no answering that.

An answer came anyway, words almost without my wanting them. "The scars on you leg. The damage I did."

"Shut up."

_My_ look on _his_ face told to me stop. He had me down: my cross and petulant way; to the life.

I said nothing.

It was snowing again and the sunlight though still filtered, was stronger. Back at the parking lot where patches of asphalt showed here and there, his car was the only one in sight, its paint a glossy medium gray reflecting the light off the snow.

Unexpectedly he pressed me close against the car and shut my mouth with a kiss, a long kiss. He tasted of chocolate.

"I still love the cold, the snow; I still love you." He said, steam rising from our mouths melodramatically. "I know it sounds corny, but it's true enough."

I allowed my head a moment on his shoulder, "I'm sorry."

"About what?"

"The same thing as ever."

He pushed me back to arm's length.

"Please try and be sorry about something else."

I closed my eyes to his face and saw his almost naked body, a frozen moment, in space, falling.

We sat down on the running board. I muttered low into my gloves "I won't say I'm sorry ever again, unless you want me to." Words addressed more to some unbelieved in deity than to the twenty year old I sometimes shared a bed with.

"I can hold you to that?" he asked.

I turned my head to his profile, which like anyone's, was his most abstract angle and the least revealing of anything personal, and gazed at the almost ripple in his nose until he turned. I answered him "You can hold me any way you want."

The word play was automatic, the sentiment serious. Again neither of us smiled.

On his haunches, with a hand on my knee, lit by the snow's refracted glare, he said "What you did, you can only turn over in your head so many times before it starts to eat you,"

He had these words from experience. Three years before he never would have said them, felt them. I'd inflicted them on him.

His voice pulled me in. "And we don't want that, do we?" We said together, surprising ourselves.

Half lost in my own head, I couldn't find the sorry in me. Anywhere. My persistent sense of guilt had drowned in him. There was nothing left to be sorry about. He'd told me so. This time I believed him.

He reached over, dug the crumpled wrapper from my pocket, stood up, pressed it together one more time, "It's been with us so long, maybe I should kiss it goodbye." Briefly, he seemed to consider the idea, then like the defeathered shuttlecock years before, he hurled the unkissed pellet far into the trees and out of sight.


End file.
